On CSPAN last night, I heard Rep. Jim McDermott, the Congressional Representative from my district, speaking to the Veterans for Peace meeting in San Francisco. After his remarks, there were several questions from the audience. One had to do with the actual number of casualties in the Iraq war, and the daily drumbeat of reports of "one soldier killed and three injured" and "two soldiers killed and eight injured in rocket propelled grenade attack" and on and on, almost every day. What, the questioner wanted to know, had become of the "injured?" How bad were their injuries? How many recovered? How many died a few hours or days later?

"You never hear about that," he said. "What is the real number of casualties?"

McDermott answered that the Department of Defense does not make those figures available to the news media. This, he said, is a lesson they learned from the Vietnam war. When people back home knew the actual number and nature of the casualties, it added substantial impetus to the anti-war movement. The Bush Administration is not about to let that happen this time.

The following is an excerpt from an article by Sam Goff, author of Hideous Dream: A Soldier's Memoir of the US Invasion of Haiti and of a forthcoming book, Full Spectrum Disorder.

        There are no longer any American troops being wounded in Iraq.
        Now they are "injured." Listen closely to the news and you will be hard pressed to hear the word "wounded." "Wounded" conjures up a different image than "injured," and here we see yet again the invertebrate nature of the American press. Yesterday, while preparing some onions and butternut squash, I got carried away with the knife and injured myself. That injury was treated with cold running water and a band aid that I'm not even using today.
        On the other hand, if I had been hit in the same hand with a 7.62 mm. bullet traveling in excess of 700 meters per second, I would have lost several fingers and possibly my whole hand. That's the difference between being injured and wounded. Contrary to what Hollywood would have us believe, being hit by bullets and shrapnel and secondary missiles from high explosives seldom causes something that might be dismissed as a "flesh wound." Tearing and cavitation of tissue, the shattering of bone, the severance of vessels and tendons, not to mention the absolute septic filth of these insults to the human body are anything but "just a flesh wound." This is not the image the Department of Defense and the US press want us to carry around inside our heads. We might lose our stomach for war, just as most of these "injured" troops do the very moment they are confronted with bleeding deformities, disfiguring burns, amputations, shock and pain, and often permanent disabilities.
        Now you have your leg. Now you don't. Get your head around that, and you've got your head around war.

It seems that those who are the most adamant about making sure there are wars in our country's future have never actually fought in a war themselves. Or even bothered to show up for their National Guard meetings.

Don Firth